The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 is a graphics card that is focused on budget-friendly PC builders. Nvidia has designed this GPU to knock down its competition AMD Radeon RX 480 off the throne. It is said to offer 15% more performance on average and is packed with some really beastly specs under the hood. So without any delay let’s dive down and take a look at what this card has got to offer.

Architecture:

The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 is a Pascal-powered card that was the first to come out featuring a different GPU than its brethren. It uses GP106 which is a cut down version of GP104 used in the high-tier GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, this allows getting the performance perks of the Pascal architecture at a lower cost. The GP106 is basically half as powerful in graphics computing than the GP104 but it does sport 60% of the transistors of its bigger brother.

Also, it is utilizing the same 16nm FinFET process lithography and same architectural design which fits in 128 CUDA Cores in a single streaming mini processor (SM), it has a total of 1,280 CUDA Cores spread neatly across 10 of these Pascal architecture SMs. This means it has got 50% texture units and cores of the founder edition of GTX 1080 along with 192 bits memory bus and whopping 48 ROPs (render output units).

Image by Hexus.net

Nvidia claims that the Pascal architecture has helped them achieve similar performance to the Geforce GTX 980 which was a top gaming card of the last generation based on Maxwell architecture and used to cost somewhere around $450 to $500. Despite having much fewer texture units, ROPs and smaller memory bus than the GTX 980, the GTX 1060 still keeps up in performance thanks to the new Pascal Architecture.

Specifications:

The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 was first released with 6 Gigabytes of GDDR5 memory clocked at 8,000 MHz, later Nvidia released a 3 Gigabyte model which lacked some of the performance perks.

The stock version of the GPU has a base clock of 1,506 MHz and a boost clock of 1,708 MHz, it can easily be overclocked up to 2.0 GHz. It comes loaded with 4.4 billion and 3.8 teraflops. The most impressive thing about it after all these beastly specs the Geforce GTX 1060 is a very less power consuming graphics with a TDP of 120W and requires only one six-pin power connector which means you can easily hook it up with a small power supply of 400W.

The only down point of this graphics card is that it does not support SLI connection, meaning that you can not add up another graphics card along with it to increase performance. Nvidia says that they have limited this feature for higher end cards like the GTX 1070 and 1080 and that SLI isn’t very popular among the mid-range market.

Design:

The Design element of the GTX 1060 is pretty similar to other founder edition cards, it has a die-cast aluminum chassis with a matte finish and a radial fan which exhausts the hot air out from the back vents. It also features aluminium heat sink and two copper heat pipes which keep the card really cool allowing you to heavily overclock it up to 2 GHz.

Image by Tweak PC

In terms of dimensions, the card measures 4.3×9.8 inches. It is a two-slot card with three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, an HDMI 2.0b connection, and a dual-link DVI option.

Performance and Benchmark:

The Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 offers really impressive performance for its price, we tested out some recent AAA titles like Hitman and Tomb Raider at 1080p max settings and were easily able to get 60 FPS. This graphics card will allow you to crank up all the graphics bells and whistles at 1080p. You can also run games at 1440p and it will still provide 60 FPS in most of the titles, however, in some visually demanding games the frame rate drops down to around 50 FPS.

We would not recommend this card for 4K gaming of course as the frame rates are barely playable in most games. You can try 4K in some light weight titles like CS GO. Nvidia isn’t marketing the GTX 1060 as a 4K capable card anyways.

In benchmarks also, this card performs extremely well and kick butts of its competitor like AMD Radeon RX 480 with 23% increase in performance and is also 5% faster than the GTX 980.

Final Verdict:

Overall the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 is a really budget friendly graphics card that offers some top of the line specs. The performance is also pretty solid, you can run almost any latest game at max setting with playable frame rates. It also offers VR performance at this price, the only knockdown of this graphics card is the lack of SLI support. You can buy it from Amazon here.

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